npsimons

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211.
by npsimons 6y ago
My boss on a project roped me into hobby chat as I was taking a five minute break to stretch my legs. He turned it into 40 (!) minutes of non-work chit chat. I don't want to be unfriendly, but I'm at work to get shit done because
212.
by npsimons 6y ago
Exactly! You can go both ways with this: at my house, I have exercise equipment, up to and including a barbell and plates. If I feel like grinding out some sets real quick, I can. There is absolutely no comparison to working in an office.
213.
by npsimons 6y ago
I've been at a job where projects have put us in vehicle bays with no insulation on the door, in Winter. Temperatures got down to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, there was no dress code, so I would wear my mountain Winter gear, but eve
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by npsimons 6y ago
Everything about this post is spot on, and what I've been saying for years. But management doesn't care. They don't even care about productivity. It's all about keeping up appearances, having butts in seats, and I'm
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by npsimons 6y ago
Thing is, the learning curve may be steep, but it's incredibly valuable, time very well spent. I learned VI on some UNIX tools my father installed on our DOS computer in the 90's. Then I learned Emacs in 2000 and have been tweak
216.
by npsimons 6y ago
> where auto correct gets in the way. Even without autocorrect (say, with Hacker's Keyboard on Termux), I still get frustrated by mistyped keys. "Up arrow" instead of space in bash, "o" instead of "p" i
217.
by npsimons 6y ago
My first thought on the headline are specialized concerns of the above: environment variables are an attack surface. If you use them for configuration, it's all too easy for an attacker to modify them without the victim knowing. Just l
218.
by npsimons 6y ago
I've never understood dedicating a whole darn website to such simple concepts. Perhaps that's why I'm not rich. It's three things! Just write them down somewhere. Heck, put them in a text file and check it into git. I ra
219.
by npsimons 6y ago
This has advantages and disadvantages; yes, if there is a security hole in it, it likely affects everything that uses it. But it also means it gets use-case tested more thoroughly, at a minimum. Ideally, all "stakeholders" would h
220.
by npsimons 6y ago
Remember how Adobe removed Flash support from Acrobat a couple of years back? Attacks like this are why. Well, and Flash had other issues, too. I'm not sure when you started using PDFs (I remember mid-90s when my Dad told me about this
221.
by npsimons 6y ago
> Perhaps this is an opportunity to grow! Empathy is a vastly underrated (and underdeveloped) skill.
222.
by npsimons 6y ago
This is the kind of content I come to HN for! I don't get to do a lot of low level stuff these days, and my forensics skills are almost non-existent, so it's really nice to see the process laid out. Heck, just learning of binwalk
223.
by npsimons 6y ago
> How could you EVEN read non fiction after browsing hacker news all day ? 1. Get book recommendations and research topics from being online (expand your "surface area"). 2. Step away from the computer. 3. Read books from step
224.
by npsimons 6y ago
> It's fascinating how he was writing around 100 years ago, and how around 25% is super old-timey cultural references or things that no one would think today, but how much of it is still pretty relevant. Perspectives from the past a
225.
by npsimons 6y ago
I've gotten a lot of good book referrals through HN, including "Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training" by Mark Rippetoe. So cutting out online stuff is just a bad idea (significantly reduces my "surface area").
226.
by npsimons 6y ago
> the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software Oh, he's one of that kind of cunts. Someone with an axe to grind again
227.
by npsimons 6y ago
The author is quite clearly an ignoramus on the topic of FLOSS, and can be safely ignored. I'm not sure how this got to the front page of HN. It's embarrassing, frankly.
228.
by npsimons 6y ago
> "Software vendors won’t usually be inserting spyware into their wares." JFC. I'm sorry, but this "article" can be dismissed on that alone. Software vendors already are inserting spyware into their "wares
229.
by npsimons 6y ago
Admittedly, my views on this come from the limits of my own experience - as someone who writes (and sometimes rights) software, I highly prize uninterrupted time in flow. I suppose writing and other such similar pursuits would work very wel
230.
by npsimons 6y ago
I've always felt that the best non-CS programmers were physicists, because they are always looking for the simplest model (eg, the same community that rejected a 27 dimension string theory as being too complex, but don't quote me
231.
by npsimons 6y ago
Working hours taking up so much of our life is an orthogonal, but not totally unrelated issue. As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem,
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by npsimons 6y ago
> How about creating new knowledge and process? Judging from how academics across the world, and even across decades if not centuries create new knowledge all the time, I'd say it's not a barrier to work remotely, whether that&
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by npsimons 6y ago
I second your whole post. To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out
234.
by npsimons 6y ago
I mean in the example you gave, the work was already partitioned for you. That we have high level tools that make it easy doesn't change the fact that the work of rendering frames in an animation are very clear chunks of work that lend
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by npsimons 6y ago
Not to offend, but yeah, if you've already partitioned the work to be done, then of course it's not hard. I'm pretty sure that anyone who's come into even vague contact with parallel programming understands that the ha
236.
by npsimons 6y ago
I'll second all of this: if I wasn't getting paid for working on the projects at my day job, I wouldn't work on them. I've got tons of ideas and cool projects I want to work on (some I've even made decent progress o
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by npsimons 6y ago
Oh yeah, it's working very well, for the shareholders .
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by npsimons 6y ago
> I just want to work on whatever i want to work on. This is exactly why I'm pursuing leanFIRE. Even if I hit the jackpot, I would still be toodling on personal software projects for the rest of my life. Not saying I'm any Mi
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by npsimons 6y ago
Anyone else think of "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vinge?
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by npsimons 6y ago
It reminds me of GNU Parallel[0], so I have to imagine it fits for some use cases. I stumbled upon Parallel when I was trying to do user-level "distributed" computing at the day job for running hundreds of simulations in a shorter

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